


What you're missing

by becka



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Pegging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 05:30:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/becka/pseuds/becka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis loves Eleanor, and he doesn't miss being with Harry (not really, not always). But there are certain things he hasn't asked her for until now, and certain things it's not easy to get over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What you're missing

**Author's Note:**

> Beta and handholding by Lucy/balefully/psycholinguistic.

He never tells Eleanor about Harry. It makes him a shit boyfriend, but he was always going to be kind of a shit boyfriend, and after denying it so many times to everyone who would listen, it seems like too much of a concession. And Harry, god, Harry has moved on so easily. Louis lies in bed with an arm around Eleanor, and behind his closed eyelids he pictures Harry getting thoroughly shagged by Nick Grimshaw, even though he shuts it down before he starts to get hard again. He presses his nose into the part of her hair, smells her shampoo, and Eleanor smiles into his chest. He loves her. He does. That just makes it worse.

Harry doesn't talk about his thing with Nick much, but he goes outside on his phone and comes back into the studio grinning goofily, and Louis knows that particular smile of Harry's in every part of his body. He drops an ice cube down the back of Harry's shirt and pinches the back of Harry's neck the next time he walks past, and Harry throws an orange from their fruit basket at him. And it's just matey and nice and normal, and Louis tries not to think of it any other way. They fooled around for a while, and now they don't, and that's all right.

Niall finds a women’s magazine crammed down the cushions of the sofa in the studio, and it’s a few months old and smells like stale chips, but he spends the time between takes reading out of it at the top of his voice. Louis has officially learnt more than he ever wanted to know about eyeliner by the time Niall gets to the sex bits, and they all start bothering to listen properly. “’10 New Tricks to Surprise Your Guy With,’” Niall reads out.

“That sounds like a subject we know something about,” says Harry, clambering onto the back of the sofa, knees bracketing Niall’s shoulders so he can look down at the magazine.

“What does it say then?” asks Zayn, leaning into Harry’s leg to see. They all interlock like pieces of a puzzle, slotting themselves into place, and Louis takes Harry’s other side on instinct, resting a hand on Harry’s thigh. And Liam finds the space behind him, squashed into the arm of the sofa.

Niall is already making himself laugh trying to talk like an American woman, his voice stretched up high and singsongy as he reads. “Number one. Sensual Massage.” And they can all agree that that’s a pretty good idea.

They’re all falling over each other laughing, and Louis is still miming the French maid caught by naughty householder Zayn, when Niall says, “Pegging?” in a voice that clearly communicates he has no idea what it is. He reads the explanation through incredulously, and Louis has to admit he feels a bit the same. He’s familiar with the concept, but it hadn’t really occurred to him that a girl – a normal girl like, not a girl in fetish porn – would ever want anything to do with a boy’s bum. He’s fairly willing to trust that the magazine knows its audience though, and he gets a little bit caught up in the thought that he could have that, with Eleanor. He wonders if maybe that’s all he needs to get past… whatever he might need to get past.

“Why's it called pegging then?” says Niall.

“Because she’s putting her peg in your hole,” Zayn explains. Like it's a simple matter of parts interlocking.

*

Louis suggests it to Eleanor three weeks later when they're back in Britain for a round of publicity starting in a few days, and he’s at hers for the weekend. Although honestly it would have taken him that long to work up his nerve regardless. He’s finished deleting a few days’ worth of terrible messages out of her inbox--it's his fault they're there after all--and they’re cozy on the sofa with the TV on low. “Do you know what pegging is?” he asks.

“What, like the sex thing?” she says.

"Yeah. What else?”

“I dunno. Maybe you were looking at a second career in furniture making or something.” She smiles, cheeky. “I know about the sex kind.”

“You ever thought about trying it?”

Eleanor’s a pretty straightforward person, so when she looks intrigued and not completely disgusted, Louis knows they’ll get there. He shouldn’t feel as relieved as he does, or as certain that this will be what he needs. He shouldn’t let himself hope so hard, but after this long, he’s not sure he has any other options.

*

She presses with her fingers, cool and slick, and Louis can't help the way his mind wanders, the way he catches on the memory of Harry's hands, of Harry touching him just like this. Only less tentative. Harry never hesitated the way Eleanor does. "It's tight," she says. "Is this all right?"

Louis cocks a grin at her over his shoulder. "It's perfect." She's wearing a fake cock, and her hair is falling into her eyes, and she's so lovely, doing this for him. Her breasts press softly against his back as she leans in to kiss him on the cheek, and Louis thinks that maybe this is all he needs, just this feeling sometimes.

Eleanor twists her finger in deeper, adds another, squeezes out more lube although he barely even needs it. Louis is hard under her, arching up into her hand, gasping as she hits the right depth, the right angle. "Lou," she says, sounding strange, overwhelmed, almost sad. He looks back out of the corner of his eye, and she smiles, touching the smooth underside of her cock. "Are you ready?"

She rolls on a condom, and Louis watches, braced on his elbows, his arsehole practically gaping. The fake cock is narrow, cool, and he shuts his eyes and hangs his head as the memories come. Harry had laid him out on his back the first time, and pressed into him as slowly as either of them could stand, looking down at him with the sort of solemnity he only had during sex. And Louis had nearly come from that alone, the fullness of Harry in him, moving over him. He'd squeezed his thighs around Harry's waist, and Harry's face had opened up into a grin. Louis stops himself, stifles a gasp into the pillow, tamps down the flutter of pure, stupid joy at the memory. They used to do that. And now they don't. And that's all right.

"All right?" asks Eleanor, and Louis reaches back to grip her hand, twining their fingers together and nodding. He loves her, loves her all the more for giving him this, for settling into a slow rhythm inside him and mouthing kisses against his shoulder blades. "God, Lou," she sighs. "You're so..." She doesn't finish, and Louis doesn't know what he is.

After a minute just riding the sensation of her inside him, he says, "Could you..." and tugs her hand down around his dick. The familiar feeling of her fingers wrapping him is good, grounding, and he thrusts into the tight circle of her hand. He wants to do something for her too, and the harness chafes against his knuckles as he works in under it, slides a fingertip over the hood of her clit and feels her shiver all around him. She's wet, her pussy open and slick beneath the harness, and she lays herself flat across his back as he works a fingertip into her, every little jolt of her hips dragging the fake cock across Louis's prostate. He groans out her name as he comes, his mind mercifully blank of everything but the sensation.

Eleanor shudders against him, and he can feel the way her lips purse at the top of his spine, the way her hips work in little circles. She’s trying to get herself off, squeezing around his fingers. “Let me,” Louis says, struggling up off his elbows.

The fake cock slips out of him as he rolls over, but he ignores the sharp ache of emptiness, the way his memories spring up and threaten to engulf him again. Eleanor looks shocked and then pleased as Louis works open the straps of the harness and gets his mouth on her. She’s ready for it, ripe, the lips of her pussy plump and slick. He licks into her, and she moans, gripping at his hair. It doesn’t take long before she’s coming, hips jolting up towards his mouth.

He grins up at her, pleased, and she looks thoughtfully back, rubbing her thumb across his lower lip. “You’re good at that,” she says.

“Thanks,” replies Louis. He’s not good at silences, and the look in Eleanor’s eyes makes him feel as though the bottom is dropping out of his stomach, but he can’t think what else to say. He slides up next to her, tucks an arm around her waist.

“Are you sore?” she asks, slipping her hand down between the cheeks of his arse, touching him where he’s still slick and open.

“Not bad,” he says cheerfully, fighting against the hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach, the sure knowledge that this isn’t the same at all. “You were very gentle with me.” He flutters his eyelashes a bit, for effect, but she doesn’t smile. "Did you like it?"

“You were thinking about him, weren’t you?” she says, and Louis’s whole body goes cold and then hot with shame. He wishes she weren’t touching him so intimately, and he wishes he didn’t love her too much to lie to her.

“Yeah,” he says briefly, and tucks his face into her neck and holds her closer against the confession. “Did you always know?”

“Yeah. You talk in your sleep, you idiot. Your brain doesn’t know how to keep secrets. I would have liked if you’d said though.” Her hand trails up and down his back, dipping low and then retreating, and Louis sighs into her hair, lets the silence linger for as long as he can stand before filling it up again.

“There’s never a time, you know, to say it. There isn’t. There isn’t a way it can ever be easy, and I wanted it to be easy. I didn’t want it always hanging over our heads. Seems like that didn’t work out quite right, did it?”

“Yeah,” agrees Eleanor. “Not quite. Are you still…”

Louis doesn’t want to admit the answer will be different depending what she intended the trailed-off end of the question to be. “Are you still sleeping with him?” is an obvious no, but the more Louis considers the more terrified he is that the answer to “Are you still in love with him?” is murkier. “Not since you and me got together,” he says, addressing the sex thing before she can worry over his silence.

“But you’ve thought about it. Obviously. Have you just been, I dunno, gagging for cock all this time?”

Louis wrinkles his nose, laughs in spite of himself. Her fingers press for a moment at his hole, and he shivers, pleasantly sore. "I have to say, it's not bad."

"So if we just keep on like this, and sometimes I fuck you, is that enough?" She swallows, and he looks into her eyes and sees too much there. She's too smart for him, probably, and he's known that, but he feels it too bloody clearly suddenly.

"I love you, El," he tells her, but that's no kind of answer. "And I'm not gay."

"All right," she says. "Then we'll see."


End file.
